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Eliane Elias: For The Love of Jazz
Grammy award winner. Child prodigy. Internationally renowned artist. Sophisticated and improvisational jazz pianist. A vocalist of style and grace. A woman of beauty and integrity. Yes, I am speaking of Brazil's gift to the jazz world, Eliane Elias. To be so fortunate to recently speak with this remarkable woman was a treat and memorable moment in time. We spoke about the past, present, and future. We certainly talked about her superb, and soon to be released, new album. We spoke ...
read moreCarrera Quinta: Traslaciones
As one would anticipate from the group's name--and the album's song selection--the seven-member Carrera Quinta (pared down from big-band size) plays music from South America, more specifically the Andes region of Colombia, interlaced with mainstream American jazz. The Latin Grammy-nominated ensemble's third album, Traslaciones, comprises seven songs showcasing traditional Colombian styles such as pasillo, bambuco and guabina as part of a research project developed at Universidad El Bosque School of Music in Bogota where all the members of the septet ...
read moreCorey Christiansen: La Proxima
Guitarist Corey Christiansen's early days recording for Seattle's Origin Records featured a pair of superb organ jazz recordings, Roll with it (2008) and Outlaw Tractor (2010). A versatile player, the guitarist expanded his vision with his “American West" set Lone Prairie (Origin Records, 2013), in addition to his “avant cowboy/surf rock band" on Factory Girl (Origin Records, 2016). Throughout Christiansen's eight Origin Records releases, with all their shifts and thematic changes, the music has held firmly to its ...
read moreDuduka Da Fonseca & Helio Alves featuring Maucha Adnet: Samba Jazz & Tom Jobim
Since 2007, drummer Duduka Da Fonseca, pianist Helio Alves and vocalist Maucha Adnet have been presenting the titular program at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola at New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center, and at other venues throughout the world. A concept set steeped in personalized history of varied sorts--Da Fonseca's, absorbing this hybridized style at the foot of the masters in Brazil; Adnet's and Da Fonseca's, working with the late Antonio Carlos Jobim; Alves' and Da Fonseca's, playing together in bands ...
read moreTom Rainey: Combobulated
Recorded live at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, Connecticut, Combobulated constitutes the fourth outing for what might be now seen as a free jazz supergroup, even if it wasn't when they cut Pool School (Clean Feed, 2009). The stars of saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and guitarist Mary Halvorson have continued to rise in the intervening years, while drummer Tom Rainey has been at the top of the game since the early 1990s. While the group plies its trade under Rainey's banner, ...
read moreNotre Vie Comme Un Western
The Bastille Day broadcast included new releases from John Finbury & Thelma De Freitas, Calabria Foti, Peter Eldridge & Kenny Werner and Maggie Gould plus birthday shout outs to songwriters Jimmy McHugh, Joan Whitney, saxophonist Lauren Sevian, drummer Gayelynn McKinney, cellist Akua Dixon, bassist Iris Ornig, vocalists Suzanne Pittson, Debbie Harry, Luciana Souza and trumpter Carol Morgan. Playlist Lauren Sevian “Miss Lady" from Bliss (Posi-Tone) 00:00 Andrea Wolper “The Girls in Their Dresses" from Parallel Lives (Jazzed Media) ...
read moreTula's Jazz Club: Soliloquy to a Seattle Jazz Institution
It was the tail end of a long weekend. Temperatures had risen to 80 degrees under a sunny only-in-Seattle blue sky, the waterways and markets humming with a sea of humanity. It was not a night one would expect many to venture into the quiet, dark solitude of Tula's Jazz Club, where for nearly 26 years the best of Seattle's vibrant jazz scene had come to roost. The scene up and down Second Avenue in Belltown was its usual interesting ...
read morePaul Booth: Travel Sketches
The intense media interest surrounding the rise of the British woke jazz movement is welcome, but it is increasingly monopolising local bandwidth. Great British jazz which adheres more closely to the founding American tradition is becoming sidelined. Babies and bathwater come to mind. One of the few British labels looking at the 360-degree picture is Ubuntu Music, on which tenor saxophonist Paul Booth's Travel Sketches is released. Ubuntu—the label's name is taken from the Southern African word meaning ...
read moreHILA PUNTUR: Plastic Polaroid
Aren't Polaroids largely plastic already? What other kind is there? Does this title signify that the work is fixed like a photograph or malleable like, well, plastic itself? Is it a quickly captured snapshot, or a work craftily molded into shape? When approaching Hila Puntur, all of the above are somewhat true. It's best to leave the questions and be ready to go in any direction at any moment. The group's strange blend of quasi-avant-pop-jazz is nothing if not unpredictable. ...
read moreDonald Byrd: Ethiopian Knights
Donald Byrd (1932-2013) was a solid and dependable and prolifically recorded hard-bop trumpeter during the style's mid 1950s to mid 1960s heyday, though he was never an innovator, far less an auteur. He later went on to make a string of tedious disco-cum-jazz-funk albums which sold by the truckload. On the cusp of this shift in trajectory, Byrd made a handful of unassailable groove-jazz classics. Ethiopian Knights is the best of them. Such is the enduring demand for ...
read moreRicardo Peixoto: scary beautiful
A well-known chocolate confection advertises itself as “Indescribably Delicious." That phrase also aptly describes guitarist/composer Ricardo Peixoto's album, Scary Beautiful. It is a recording of rainbow textures, infectious energies and utterly superior musicianship. And, it is one that encourages devouring. Peixoto (pronounced pay-sho-to), Brazilian by birth and now residing in L.A., gives us his third--and best--recording to date as leader. As one might expect of a player from such a rich musical and cultural landscape, the effort ...
read more50th Anniversary Blue Notes from August 1969
Salutes to Blue Note recordings by organists John Patton (with James Blood Ulmer on guitar) and Lonnie Smith (live in Atlantic City), vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson (with Harold Land), saxophonist Lou Donaldson (with Charles Earland), The Three Sounds, pianist Andrew Hill (from a session never formally released on Blue Note), as well as Wayne Shorter (with a compare & contrast with Miles Davis—radically different versions of the same tune). Be sure to tell you friends about the show, and explore the ...
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